To be taken captive by the Indians, was among the early colonists considered the most terrible of all calamities; and it was indeed a fearful thing to become the victim of their revenge. But those who were enduring the actual sufferings of captives, or suffering still more from terror of uncertain evils, thought little of the provocation given by our own people. The innocent often suffered for the guilty, and however persevering the efforts of the government to be just, in its infancy, in a wild unknown country, it was impossible to control unprincipled marauders. Some atrocious act was first committed by white men, which drove the Indian to retaliation, and thinking pale faces were all alike, he did not wait till the real offender fell into his hands. When the white men first came, the Indians looked upon them as superior beings. They were ready to worship Columbus and his little party, and all along on the coast, until their simple trust was outraged beyond endurance they welcomed the strangers—gave them food when they were hungry, and sheltered them when they were cold. It was not till their encroachments became alarming, that the Indian asserted his rights, and if in all cases he had been as justly and kindly dealt with as by the Quakers of Pennsylvania, there would not have been so dark a record of sin and wrong, and torture. If none but men of principle had made treaties with them, and all whose duty it was to observe them, had kept their faith, revenge would not have come out so prominently in Indian character. But it was not in obedience to national policy that those who were taken in battle were put to the torture, and burned and flayed. The Six Nations had never found it necessary to build prisons and dig dungeons for their own people. If a man committed murder, they sometimes decided that he should die, and sometimes bade him flee far away where none who knew him could ever look upon his face. But crimes were so rare that they had no criminal code, and when they overcame their enemies, they either adopted them and treated them as friends, or put them immediately to death. White people have sometimes put Indians to death, and oftener put them in dungeons to waste and starve, but it was no part of their practice to adopt them and call them brethren! Had they sometimes done this, or sent them freely back to their friends unharmed, they might have conciliated where they only made more desperate. When families were bereaved, they sought to be revenged on those who had bereaved them; and when warriors returned from battle, the prisoners were given up to the friends who were afflicted. With them alone it remained to decide the fate of those who fell into their hands. If they chose, they adopted them in place of the husbands and brothers who were slain; and if they so decided, they were put to death, and in any way they decreed.